Download Darwinian Evolutionary Ethics

Darwinian Evolutionary Ethics: Between Patriotism and Sympathy
Peter J. Richerson
and
Robert Boyd
Summary
Darwin believed that his theory of evolution would stand or fall on its ability to account for
human behavior. No species could be an exception to his theory without imperiling the whole
edifice. One of the most striking features of human behavior is our very elaborate social life
involving cooperation with large numbers of other people. The evolution of the ethical
sensibilities and institutions of humans was thus one of his central concerns. Darwin made four
main arguments regarding human morality: (1) that it is a product of group selection; (2) that an
immense difference existed between human moral systems and those of other animals; (3) that
the human social instincts were “primeval” and essentially the same in all modern humans; and
(4) that moral progress was possible based on using the instinct of sympathy as the basis for
inventing and favoring the spread of improved social institutions. Modern studies of cultural
evolution suggest that Darwin’s arguments about the evolution of morality are largely correct in
their essentials.
Submitted for inclusion in Evolutionary Ethics: Biological and Theological Perspectives on
Human Morality, Philip Clayton and Jeffrey Schloss, editors
Copyright 2003 Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd
Introduction
Darwin believed that his theory of evolution by natural and sexual selection would stand or fall
on its ability to account for human behavior. No species could be an exception to his theory
without imperiling the whole edifice (Gruber 1974: Chapter 10). He thus eventually devoted the
Descent of Man to developing an evolutionary account of human origins based on selection, but
also on the inheritance of acquired variation.
What Darwin called the “moral faculties” were a major part of his account of humans.
One of the most striking features of human behavior is our very elaborate social life involving
cooperation with large numbers of other people. As the philosopher-historian Robert Richards
(1987) shows in elegant detail, the Descent was a sophisticated piece of work that even today
repays close study, not least for its theory of the evolution of morality. Darwin made four main
arguments regarding human morality: (1) that it is a product of group selection; (2) that an
immense difference existed between human moral systems and those of other animals; (3) that
the human social instincts were “primeval” and essentially the same in all modern humans; and
(4) that moral progress was possible based on using the instinct of sympathy as the basis for
inventing and favoring the spread of improved social institutions. Modern studies of cultural
evolution suggest that Darwin’s arguments about the evolution of morality are largely correct in
their essentials.
Darwin’s Ethical System
Humans from the beginning
Darwin's early M and N notebooks on Man, Mind and Materialism make clear the important
place that the human species played in the formation of his ideas on evolution (Gruber 1974). In
August 1838, a few weeks before his first clear statement of the principle of natural selection
was recorded in his notebook on The Transmutation of Species, Darwin wrote in his M notebook
Origin of man now proved.—Metaphysics must flourish.—He who understand baboon
would do more toward metaphysics than Locke (Barrett, in Gruber 1974: 281)
In October 1938, just after he formulated his first clear idea of natural selection, he confided to
his N notebook
To study Metaphysics as they have always been studied appears to me to be like puzzling
at astronomy without mechanics.—Experience shows that the problem of the mind
cannot be solved without attacking the citadel itself.—the mind a function of the body.—
we must bring some stable foundation to argue from.— (Barrett, in Gruber, 1974: 331)
These words were written in the heat of Darwin's most creative period. These passages are an
expression of hopeful enthusiasm rather than triumph. He was actively pursuing a purely
materialistic theory of organic evolution, and was already committed to the idea that humans
would belong under the theory. Given the scope of the theory, it could hardly be otherwise. On
the one hand, evolutionary theory, if correct, should provide powerful tools to understand human
behavior. On the other, if humans are not understandable in evolutionary terms, then critics
would properly suspect deep, general problems with the theory.
When Darwin published Origin of Species, he included the famous teaser “light would be
thrown on the origin of man and his history.” When none of his allies rose to the occasion, he
eventually took on the task of writing the Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex
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(1871,1874). In the Introduction, he wrote of his fear that publication of his views on the subject
would inflame prejudices against his theory. This fear was not unfounded. As the Quarterly
Review’s commentator, probably the long hostile and devoutly Catholic St. George Mivart,
gloated, the Descent “offers a good opportunity for reviewing his whole position” (and rejecting
it, Anonymous 1871).
Darwin differed from many of his contemporaries in not believing progress, including moral
progress of humans, a necessary or intrinsic part of evolution. Natural selection’s subtractive
rather than creative property makes it a implausible force for progress. As Darwin expressed the
matter in his N notebook in November 1838
Man’s intellect is not become superior to that of the Greeks (which seems opposed to
progressive development) on account of the dark ages.—Look at Spain now.—Man’s
intellect might well deteriorate.-((effects of external circumstances)) ((In my theory there is
no absolute tendency to progression, excepting from favorable circumstances!)) (Barrett, in
Gruber, 1974: 339)
Why were Darwin’s contemporaries so keen on progressive theories of evolution? The original
nub of the matter was that almost all Victorians understood and feared the impact that a
thoroughly Darwinian theory of human origins would have upon morals. As the Edinburgh
Review's anonymous (1871) commentator on the Descent remarked:
If our humanity be merely the natural product of the modified faculties of brutes, most
earnest-minded men will be compelled to give up those motives by which they have
attempted to live noble and virtuous lives, as founded on a mistake....
According to Burrow (1966), a significant segment of Victorian opinion was skeptical about
conventional religion and was often enthusiastic about evolution. However, they did believe that
human morality required the support of natural laws. If God’s Law were to be dismissed by the
scientific minded as superstition, then all that much more important to find a substitute in natural
laws that scientists were elucidating. Darwin’s evolutionary theory of morality does have a
progressive element, despite his general suspicions about evolutionary progress. However,
human moral progress is by no means guaranteed by a natural law; his theory is much more
contingent than that.
Darwin’s four-part argument
Group selection
His theory of the origins of human morality is sketched in Chapter 5 of the Descent, “On the
Development of the Intellectual and Moral Faculties During Primeval and Civilized Time.” He
proposed that natural selection on groups operated in primeval times to produce human moral
capacities (172-180):
It must not be forgotten that although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no
advantage to each individual man and his children over other men of the same tribe, yet
that an increase in the number of well-endowed men and an advancement in the standard
of morality will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another. A tribe
including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism,
fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to
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sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes;
and this would be natural selection (178-179).
Note especially the terms patriotism and sympathy for future reference.
An Immense Gap
In the chapters of the Descent on the “Comparison of the Mental Powers of Man and the Lower
Animals,” Darwin summarizes the issue:
We have seen in the last two chapters that man bears in his bodily structure clear traces of
his descent from some lower form; but it may be urged that, as man differs so greatly in
his mental power from all other animals, there must be some error in this conclusion. No
doubt the difference in this respect is enormous . . . . The difference would, no doubt, still
remain immense, even if one of the higher apes had been improved and civilized as much
as a dog has been in comparison with its parent form, the wolf or jackal. (94)
The moral sense perhaps affords the best and highest distinction between man and the
lower animals (171).
In these chapters he struggles with the challenge that the great gap between humans and
other animals poses for his theory of the gradual, step by small step, emergence of humans from
their ape ancestors. How much easier his task would have been if he seen fit to people the gap
with the living human races, as so many of his contemporaries did! Gaps are an embarrassment
to his theory of evolution by gradual changes. As it is, to minimize the extent of the immense gap
he tends to raise non-human animals up rather than cast the lower races down:
there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental
faculties. . . . With respect to animals very low in the scale, I shall give some additional
facts under Sexual Selection, showing that their mental powers are much higher than
might have been expected (95).
Considering the case as a whole, the evidence was clear enough in Darwin’s time. Even the
simplest human societies are larger than any other primate society. No human society is without
ethical rules that make peaceful interactions between non-relatives routine. These attributes,
along with our technological prowess, made us, even as “savages,” a widespread and successful
species while the other apes remain confined to the tropical forests of our common ancestor.
Social Instincts Primeval
Darwin pointedly credits “savages” with a loyalty to their tribes sufficient to motivate selfsacrifice to the point of death and with the “instinct” of sympathy, with the objective of making
sure that the reader understands that these moral sentiments are of primeval age, shared by the
living savage and the civilized alike. Darwin's theory of moral evolution in the Descent is in
many respects one more typical of the last half of the 20th Century that of the Victorian 19th. Just
as he did not make progress the centerpiece of his story, he did not rank humans, as regards their
minds or their moral intuitions, on a primitive-advanced progressive scale.
Darwin’s first published views on humans in the Journal of Researches (Voyage of the
Beagle) were made several years after formulating his early ideas on natural selection, but more
than a decade before their publication and 25 years before the Descent. His descriptions of the
Fuegans in the Journal are often quoted to demonstrate that his views of the hierarchy of races
were stereotypically Victorian. He did use the most purple Victorian prose to describe the
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wretched and lowly state of the Fuegans, whom he had observed first-hand on the Beagle voyage
(Darwin 1845, pp. 242-7):
These poor wretches were stunted in their growth, their hideous faces bedaubed with white
paint, their skins filthy and greasy, their hair entangled, their voices discordant, and their
gestures violent. Viewing such men, one can hardly make one’s self believe that they are
fellow-creatures, and inhabitants of the same world (243).
They cannot know the feeling of having a home, and still less that of domestic affection; for
the husband is to the wife a brutal master to a laborious slave. Was a more horrible deed
ever perpetrated than that witnessed on the west coast by Byron, who saw a wretched
mother pick up her bleeding dying infant-boy, whom her husband had mercilessly dashed on
the stones for dropping a basket of sea-eggs! (246).
He goes on at some length in this fashion, but this is the bait rather than the hook of the
argument. The passage on the Fuegans begins with a description of the rigors of the environment
of Tierra del Fuego and ends by attributing the low nature of the people to the poor quality of the
environment rather than as representing inherently primitive people:
We were detained here for several days by the bad weather. The climate is certainly
wretched: the summer solstice was now past [passage is dated December 25] yet every
day snow fell on the hills, and in the valleys there was rain. The thermometer generally
stood at 45° but in the nights fell to 38° or 40° (242).
While beholding these savages, one asks, whence could they have come? What could
have tempted, or what change compelled a tribe of men, to leave the fine regions of the
North, to travel down the Cordillera or backbone of America . . . and then to enter on one
of the most inhospitable countries within the limits of the globe? . . . [W]e must suppose
that they enjoy a sufficient share of happiness, of whatever kind it may be, to render life
worth living. Nature by making habit omnipotent, and its effects hereditary, has fitted the
Fuegans to the climate and the productions of this miserable country (246-247).
The argument is quite in keeping with his idea that progress under his theory could only come
from favorable circumstances. In effect he is saying that any humans—Englishmen, say—forced
to live under such conditions with such limited technology would rapidly come to behave
similarly. Note the reference to hereditary habits; this concept figures large in his mature ideas
on human evolution.
Darwin was also well aware of the evidence that the pioneering ethnographers and
archaeologists of his time were producing on the history and prehistory of our species. He
reviews this in the Descent under the heading On the Evidence that all Civilized Nations were
once Barbarous (193-195):
The evidence that all civilized nations are the descendants of barbarians, consists, on the one
side, of clear traces of their former low condition in still-existing customs, beliefs, language,
etc.; and, on the other side, of proofs that savages are independently able to raise themselves
a few steps on the scale of civilization, and have actually thus risen (193).
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In Darwin’s day no absolute time scale could be put on the rise of civilization, and he makes no
attempt to even guess about the matter. However, the evidence he adduces for the “few steps”
comes from ethnographic observations, so the time scale for the rise of civilizations must be
relatively short.
The climax of Darwin’s argument in the Descent is Chapter 7, “On the Races of Man.” He
considers two hypotheses: that the races are sufficiently distinct to count as different species, and
that they are alike in all important organic respects. He first spends several pages outlining all the
evidence in favor of the different species hypothesis (Darwin, 1874: 224-231). Darwin’s
dispassionate tone in these pages makes it easy for careless readers to believe that this is the
alternative Darwin favors. However, he then goes immediately on to demolish the separate
species argument in favor of the trivial differences alternative (231-240).
Although the existing races differ in many respects, as in color, hair, shape of the skull,
proportions of the body, etc., yet, if their whole structure be taken into consideration, they
are found to resemble each other closely on a multitude of points. Many of these are so
unimportant or of so singular a nature that it is extremely improbable that they should have
been independently acquired by aboriginally distinct species or races. The same remark
holds good with equal or greater force with respect to the numerous points of mental
similarity between the most distinct races of man. The American aborigines, Negroes, and
Europeans are as different from each other in mind as any three races that can be named; yet
I was constantly struck, while living with the Fuegians on board the “Beagle,” with the
many little traits of character showing how similar their minds were to ours; and so it was
with a full-blooded Negro with whom I happened once to be intimate (237).
The contrast between Darwin and others like Ernst Haeckel who really did think that “natural
men (e.g. Indian Vedas or Australian Negroes) are closer to the higher vertebrates (e.g. apes and
dogs) than to highly civilized Europeans” could hardly be more stark (Richards 1987: 596).
The extent to which Darwin subscribed to what we now call the doctrine of psychic unity is
widely misunderstood. Even otherwise knowledgeable scholars believe that Darwin shared the
widespread Victorian belief that the living races could be ranked on a primitive-advanced scale
(e.g. Ingold 1986: 53). Bowler (1993: 70) remarks “The Descent of Man takes racial hierarchy
for granted and cites the conventional view that whites have a larger cranial capacity than other
races” (in constructing the argument he proceeds to demolish, we note!). Alexander Alland
(1985: 4-5) approvingly quotes Stephen Jay Gould to the effect that Darwin shared the typical
Victorian idea that the dark races are lower in the progressive evolutionary sense. As Geoffrey
Hodgson (MS) and earlier Robert Bannister (1979) have shown, Social “Darwinists” of the type
imagined by Hofstadter (1945) hardly existed at all and Darwin and his closest followers were
not among them! We find it quite odd that contemporary social scientists, operating in a liberal
to radical political milieu, fail to recognize that Darwin’s general political views, while not often
worn on his sleeve to the extent that his views on slavery were, were far to the left for his day,
and not so different from those of the modern non-doctrinaire academic left (Sulloway
1996:Chapter 10; Desmond 1989: Afterword; Richards 1987: 597).
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Moral progress via sympathy and other prosocial dispositions
For further advances, Darwin puts great weight on customs acquired by imitation (174). He
spends several pages reviewing the tendency of advancing civilization, if anything, to weaken
natural selection (180-193). He summarizes the argument:
I have already said enough, while treating of the lower races, on the causes which lead to
the advance of morality, namely the approbations of our fellow-men—the strengthening
of our sympathies by habit—example and imitation—reason—experience, and even selfinterest—instruction during youth, and religious feelings (185-186).
And, in current circumstances:
With highly civilized nations, continued progress depends in a subordinate degree on
natural selection. . . . The more efficient causes of progress seem to consist of a good
education during youth while the brain is impressible, and of a high standard of
excellence, inculcated by the ablest and best men, embodied in the laws, customs, and
traditions of the nation, and enforced by public opinion (192).
Note that the means of moral progress that apply in his mind to the lower races is virtually
identical to those that apply to the highest. Primeval evolution endowed living savages with the
same social instincts as civilized people, and hence they are susceptible to the same improvement
from “good education” and the rest. The lower races have the same moral instincts as the higher;
the higher have just had the advantage of a favorable environment to push moral progress a little
further.
Since people from different places do differ substantially in behavior, Darwin, of course,
needed an account of human diversity. In Chapter 7 of the Descent he makes something like the
modern distinction between organic differences and customs:
He who will read Mr. Tylor’s and Sir J. Lubbock’s interesting works can hardly fail to be
deeply impressed with the close similarity between the men of all races in tastes,
dispositions and habits (238).
Darwin’s favorable citations of Tylor, the founder of cultural anthropology and one of the
important 19th Century defenders of the Enlightenment doctrine of the psychic unity of all
humans, is surely significant and quite in keeping with his sympathy for savages and slaves.
Tylor’s (1871: 7) postulate of organic similarity but customary difference is clear:
For the present purpose it appears both possible and desirable to treat mankind as
homogeneous in nature, though placed in different grades of civilization.
Darwin sometimes uses the exactly same distinction:
As it is improbable that the numerous and unimportant points of resemblance between the
several races of man in bodily structure and mental faculties (I do not here refer to similar
customs) should all have been independently acquired . . . . (239)
For Darwin the explanation for differences between races has to do with customs, not organic
differences. The story is complicated for us to understand because of Darwin’s frequent use of
the concept of inherited habits, as in the quote about the Fuegians above. In the preface to the
second edition of the Descent, Darwin reiterated his commitment to the inheritance of acquired
variation:
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I may take this opportunity of remarking that my critics frequently assume that I attribute
all changes of corporeal structure and mental power exclusively to natural selection of
such variation as are often called spontaneous; whereas, even in the first edition of the
“Origin of Species,” I distinctly stated that great weight must be attributed to the
inherited effects of use and disuse, with respect both to the body and the mind (3-4).
One of the most important forms of the inherited effects of use and disuse in Darwin’s mind is
“inherited habits.” Custom, good education, imitation, example of the best men, and other
manifestations of culture would tend to become hereditary in Darwin’s scheme. Lacking the 20th
Century concept of a gene isolated from direct environmental modification, a rigid distinction
between inheritance by imitation and inheritance by organic structures was foreign to his
thinking. He does seem to divide traits into more and less conservative poles. On the
conservative side are basic anatomy and basic features of the mind, little influenced by the
inheritance of acquired variation but mainly by selection over long spans of time. More labile
traits are much more sensitive to environmental and cultural influences, though they also come to
be inherited. Inheritance notwithstanding, the more labile traits are susceptible to being rapidly
remodeled again by inherited habit if the environment changes. In this feature of his theory was
erroneous and archaic; still the conservative-labile distinction does the same work for Darwin
that the genetic-cultural one does for us.
Moral progress in Darwin’s theory is clearly not automatic. He is quite alive to the moral
deficiencies of the advanced civilizations. He forthrightly condemns Argentinean General Rosa’s
war against the natives of Patagonia in the Journal (Darwin, 1845: 36-37; 121-125; 561-563) and
expresses sympathy and admiration for the Indian resistance. For example, he ends the
recounting of a story of an Indian’s daring escape with his small son from a genocidal attack
Argentineans:
What a fine picture one can form in one’s mind—the naked, bronze-like figure of the old
man with his little boy, riding like a Mazeppa on a white horse, thus leaving far behind
him the host of his pursuers! (124)
His anguished paean against slavery begins (561-563):
On the 19th of August, we finally left the shores of Brazil. I thank God I shall never again
visit a slave country. To this day, if I hear a distant scream, it recalls with vivid
painfulness my feelings when, passing a house near Pernambuco I heard the most pitiable
moans, and could not but suspect that some poor slave was being tortured, yet knew that I
was as powerless as a child even to remonstrate.
And ends:
It makes one’s blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that Englishmen and our American
descendants with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty: but it is a
consolation to reflect that we have made a greater sacrifice than ever made by any nation
to expiate our sin. [Britain freed the slaves in all her colonies in 1838.]
Gruber (1974: 65-68) notes that Darwin’s deep antipathy to slavery was shared with his extended
family circle, though not nearly so widely shared by his contemporaries, leading for example, to
a furious argument with Captain Fitzroy on the Beagle voyage.
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Darwin does not develop a detailed account of what makes for moral progress and
regression. He certainly thought that moral progress was possible, and clearly thought that
Europeans had achieved some notable advances relative to savages. Things like the rule of law
and the having of just laws supported by enlightened public opinion, such has had ended slavery
in the British Empire, he counted as progress. Most of us would agree. What about regressions
like slavery and colonial genocide? He seems to suggest that patriotism will tend to conflict with
and limit the scope of sympathy. Sympathy on its own easily extends to everyone, but patriotism
demands allegiance to country, caste, class or tribe and limits sympathy toward outgroups.
Slaveowners, through solidarity with others of the slave-owning caste, could develop racist
theories and institutions of ruthless subordination that limited the effects of empathy toward
slaves. Darwin seems to be arguing that moral progress beyond what natural selection can
achieve is accomplished by increasing the scope of empathy at the expense of narrow patriotism.
A spiritual foundation?
Darwin’s own religious apostasy is well known. In his student years, he had much enjoyed
Paley’s Natural Theology. During the time of the voyage of the Beagle (1831-1836) and
immediately afterward he read Charles Lyell on geology and adopted a turn of mind that
mandated, as the proper scientific approach, a highly mechanistic account of natural processes.
His theory of natural selection was an explicitly materialistic explanation for the origins of
organic form in which no influence of natural theology remained (Gruber 1974: 125-127).
Nevertheless, Darwin sometimes writes so lyrically about the natural world that one is tempted
to take him as a sort of nature mystic. The most famous passage of this sort is the last paragraph
of the Origin of Species
It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many
kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with
worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed
forms, so different from each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by
laws acting around us. . . . There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers,
having originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has
gone on cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning
endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
Many a scientific naturalist seems to derive a religious experience from the close study of nature.
In the modern case, field biologists’ devotion to the preservation of nature suggests that such
appreciations lead to a powerful ethical impulse as well. By some accounts, Saint Francis was a
nature mystic (Armstrong 1973). One wonders if scientists don’t often experience the awe of
nature but simply don’t use a theistic vocabulary to describe the experience (Kiester 1996/1997).
A Modernization of Darwin’s Argument
In the light of modern evolutionary theory, Darwin’s theory for the evolution of morality and
moral progress had two main weaknesses. First, Darwin was quite confused about the nature of
inheritance as we have seen. In his mind, inherited habits connected customs—culture in our
terms—directly to the process of organic inheritance. Geneticists long ago showed that the
genetic system generally lacks the inheritance of acquired variation. Second Darwin’s theory is
heavily reliant on group selection. Most evolutionary biologists believe that individually costly
group-beneficial behavior can only arise as a side effect of individual fitness maximization.
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Many, but by no means all, students of evolution and human behavior have followed the
argument against group selection forcefully articulated by George Williams (1966). Several
prominent modern Darwinians—W.D. Hamilton (1975), E.O. Wilson (Wilson 1975: 561-562),
R.D. Alexander (Alexander 1987: 169), and I. Eibl-Eibesfeld (Eibl-Eibesfeld 1982)—have given
serious consideration to group selection as a force in the special case of human ultra-sociality.
However, most theorists do not believe that genetic systems will maintain enough variation
between groups for group selection to be a strong force, except in small groups of close genetic
relatives (see Sober and Wilson, (1998) for a contrary view). We believe that cultural variation is
more plausibly susceptible to group selection than is genetic variation.
This argument is developed below using the idea that Darwinian tools are as useful for
understanding cultural evolution as for genetic evolution. The basic idea is this: Learning from
someone else by imitation or teaching is similar to acquiring genes from parents. A potentially
important determinant of behavior is transmitted from one individual to another in both cases. As
individuals acquire genes or culture, they draw their genetic parents and cultural models from a
large population of potential parents and cultural models. Then, evolutionary processes operate
on individuals, discriminating in favor of some cultural and genetic variants and against others.
The population that exists for the next generation to sample typically differs subtly from the
previous one. As many generations pass, changes accumulate and evolution occurs. This analogy
between genetic and cultural evolution is undoubtedly what led Darwin to so thoroughly confuse
the two. Both are population-level, historical processes that frequently result in the adaptive
diversification of behavior. Luigi Cavalli-Sforza and Marcus Feldman (1981) and their followers
have developed a considerable body of theory about cultural evolution by modifying standard
evolutionary theory to fit the case of culture.
The evolution of human morality
A good deal of our own work and that of our students has been devoted to understanding the
evolution of human sociality. Step by step, we have been led to what amounts to a modernization
of Darwin’s theory of the evolution of human morality. We outline this modernization under the
same headings that we used to describe Darwin’s original theory: (1) that group selection is the
basic mechanism explaining human moral impulses; (2) that an immense gap exists between the
moral faculties of humans and other animals; (3) that the moral faculties evolved in the common
ancestors of all living humans; and (4) that moral progress arises when humans create social
institutions that enlarge sympathy and control patriotism.
What is the phenomenon to be explained? In most animal societies, the animals that
cooperate are close kin, as in the colonies of social insects based upon a single reproducing
queen. Cooperation in such systems is well explained by W.D. Hamilton’s (Hamilton 1964)
famous inclusive fitness theory, proposing that individuals can be altruistic toward others to the
degree that they share genes “identical by common descent.” While human familial altruism fits
neatly into this pattern, human societies always include supra-familial institutions. Some
complex of innate predispositions and culturally transmitted dispositions leads human societies
to have customary systems of tacit and formal rules that mold family units into a larger social
system. Even at their simplest, these social systems differ from those of our close ape relatives in
having larger amounts of cooperation between un- or distantly related individuals and in linking
together people who do not reside in the same group (Rodseth et al. 1991). To judge from
contemporary simple societies, three more or less hierarchical levels of social organization
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characterized our ancestral Upper Paleolithic societies: the family, the coresidential band, and a
collection of bands that routinely intermarry, speak a common language, and have a common set
of myths and rituals. Families were similar to modern families and bands were rather fluid units.
Members of the largest unit, often called a tribe, generally maintain relatively peaceable relations
with each other, and routinely cooperate in subsistence, defense, and other activities. It often
spoke a distinctive language or dialect and consisted of a few hundred to a few thousand people.
Compared to many agriculturally based societies of the last 10,000 years, the sophistication
of political organization of hunting and gathering societies is slight. Often such units had no
formal political leadership at all and yet such units were able to maintain long-term alliances
with other tribes. Often highly egalitarian (although often quite sexist, as Darwin observed),
these societies functioned as if every male adult were a member of an informal parliament
informally led by the able and respected. Sometimes band headmen were formally recognized
and sometimes their consultations were formal enough to warrant calling them a tribal council.
Intertribal institutions were not uncommon. In addition to alliances, intertribal religious
organizations were not rare. Inter-band affairs were probably regulated by ad hoc negotiations
dominated but not controlled by the headmen.
The important point is that even such simple societies are a moral community, governed by a
common set of widely respected rules that vary from tribe to tribe. For example, in many such
societies, a rich and delicately balanced set of institutions exist which both quietly honor
successful hunters (skill in this regard is quite variable) and prevent them from becoming petty
tyrants (Boehm 1999). The role of religion in simple human societies has been much debated
(BELIEVE 2003). Suffice it to say here that supernatural beliefs, legends and stories, and
collective ritual must have been common if not universal features of our ancestors’ societies.
Cultural Group Selection
What if we imagine that cultural rather than genetic variation is the subject of group selection?
Several common properties of cultural inheritance make it a much more plausible candidate for
group selection than genes.
First, if only a few influential teachers exist in each group, much variation between them is
likely to be created (Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman, 1981: 204, 338-9). In the case of moral
systems, the instant establishment of a major cultural variant by the charismatic founders of new
religions and political ideologies is well known (Stark 1997; Abanes 2002). The formation of
micro-cults and micro-parties is a rather common phenomenon, and only a handful of these
become even modest successes. Clearly a selection process winnows the variants on offer, and
we have some idea of how the process works (Stark and Bainbridge 1996). Very rarely, great
ethical teachers like Moses, Christ, Confucius, and Mohammed are able to put their stamp on a
whole series of civilizations.
Second, the conformist “When in Rome” imitation rule has a strong tendency to minimize
the effects of migration on the variation between groups (Boyd and Richerson 1985, Chap. 7,
Henrich and Boyd 1998). Even if migrants are fairly common, so long as they do not approach
half the population of a group, resident culture will have an advantage over that of minority
migrants; it will be over-represented due to the conformity of old-stock individuals and secondgeneration migrants alike to the commoner norms. The very considerable assimilation of many
immigrants to the USA to British-American culture is testimony to the power of this effect.
Speed not Comfort Pg. 11
Third, the symbolic aspects of culture are a potent source of variation between groups (Boyd
and Richerson 1985: Chapter 8). Symbolic differences can also arise in isolated groups through a
kind of runaway process that perhaps explains the extreme exaggeration we observe in fads and
fashions, and in the colorful excesses with regard to ordinary utility in many ritual systems.
Ritual, religious belief, and language isolate groups, potentiating group selection. Symbolic
systems act to protect groups from the effects of migration, much as in the case of conformity,
because people ordinarily tend to admire, respect, and imitate individuals displaying familiar
symbolic traits. Cultural chauvinism is distressingly common and contributes to sharp, too-often
violent, competition between groups. Directly important aspects of culture, such as the ethical
norms that are the basis for patterns of altruism and for the basic form of social organization, are
often embedded in richly symbolic belief systems.
Selection on cultural groups can often be fairly rapid because cultural death and
reproduction do not necessarily depend upon the physical death and reproduction of people.
Defeated groups often are incorporated into the victorious society, or by friendly groups not
involved in the conflict. In simpler societies, defeat in war typically results in more captives and
refugees than dead. Thus, war generates migration, which is much more hostile to genetic than
cultural group selection. We have attempted to measure the rate of cultural group selection in
simple societies, using data on local group extinctions in Highland New Guinea in pre-contact
time (Soltis, Boyd, and Richerson 1995). These rates are fairly substantial, and might result in
the replacement of less favorable with more group-favorable traits in a large population of
societies in something like 1,000 years. This seems about right to account for the relatively slow,
halting evolution of more complex and more powerful polities over the 10,000 years since crop
cultivation made complex societies ecologically feasible.
Other modes of cultural group selection exist besides the one tested by Soltis. Successful
societies also attract imitators, so that a culture could expand without any overt conflict at all
(Boyd and Richerson 2002). This form of cultural group selection is potentially very rapid. Much
of the spread of European culture in the last 500 years was due to the displacement and/or
replacement of indigenous peoples, as in the case of the Indians and European settlers in North
America. Currently, however, Europeanization (“modernization” and “globalization”) depends
much more upon the voluntary adoption of party systems, parliaments, Marxism, Christianity,
university education, factory organization of work, and so forth than it does on displacement or
forced conversion. Most likely, both the slow Soltis mode of group selection and the faster intergroup imitation processes are important. Group imitation can only transfer variation that is
relatively easily observed. At least the nuances of social organization are often difficult to
appreciate from afar and are often difficult to establish piecemeal in a host society. Douglass
North (1973) among others—Karl Marx comes to mind; see Bettinger and Baumhoff (1982) for
the case of simple societies—argues that innovations in social institutions have been the rate
limiting step in the evolution of more sophisticated social systems. Social organizations probably
have elements that evolve on the Soltis time scale. A parliamentary form of government is easy
to adopt, but the dispositions, skills, and ancillary institutions necessary to make such a
government work like the Western model are not so easily transferred. In this regard, religious
conversion is potentially a potent vehicle for the cross-cultural transfer of social institutions
because proselytizing religions like Christianity and Islam have well-developed means of making
conversion easy. Still, syncretism with local beliefs and practices is also commonplace. The
general role of religious conversion in the diffusion of social institutions would repay study.
Speed not Comfort Pg. 12
Finally, theoretical models suggest that group selection is especially potent on systems of
punishment (Boyd et al. 2003; Henrich and Boyd 2001). The reason the models work the way
they do is easy to appreciate. Helping acts are costly every time one engages in them. As altruists
become common, the number of hands to help increases, but so do those in need of help. Helping
remains costly. Also, as altruists become more common, they will tend to run the risk of “moral
hazard.” Knowing that helpful individuals are common, individuals will be motivated to take
risks, be lazy, or be otherwise feckless, knowing that plentiful helpful souls will likely aid them.
Worse yet, pure altruists may attract con artists who will victimize them. Cooperative
communities of many altruists will tend to produce surpluses that attract predators. On the other
hand, the costs of being a punisher of those who break moral rules reliably drops as punishers
become more common. When punishers are vanishingly rare, each punisher will have a large
load of work to do. In an evolutionary sense, punishment is hard to get started. But if punishers
ever become common, they will have many hands to share the work of punishment and fewer
individuals will be in need of punishment. In the limit when everyone is a punisher, punishers
have absolutely no work to do! In Boyd and company’s models, the evolutionary dynamics tend
to become complicated since the strategy of being altruistic but not punishing tends to invade a
system that is rich in punishers because non-punisher altruists are both protected by punishers
and evade the cost of punishment. So long as any work remains for punishers to do, altruist nonpunishers will increase at their expense. But as the number of non-punisher altruists rises, the
opportunity for non-punisher, non-altruist rascals to invade the system increases. Nevertheless,
models suggest that relatively weak group selection can keep the frequency of punishers high in
such a system.
The empirical literature suggests that punishment institutions are a ubiquitous feature of
human societies. For example, Elinor Ostrom (1990), one of the leading students of small-scale
commons management, details a number of quite sophisticated punishment and monitoring
systems and could find no successful commons management schemes without such institutions.
The typical systems are elaborately graded and begin with light warnings and only progress to
harsh penalties for repeated substantial transgressors. So too with other sorts of transgressions.
The rule of law in modern societies is similarly graded, but eventually appealing to long prison
sentences and even death for sufficiently persistent or egregious misbehavior. The pacifist Amish
ultimately rigorously shun those who stubbornly disdain gentler attempts to enforce the
congregation’s rules (Hostetler 1993).
Thus, human-scale societies may have evolved because the peculiar properties of the
cultural inheritance system lend themselves to group selection. Originally, processes like
conformity may merely have functioned to reduce the risk of adopting foreign traits that are less
likely to be useful than home-grown ones in an environment that varies from place to place.
Group selection, and resulting indiscriminate altruism from the genetic point of view, may at first
have been merely a by-product of adaptation to spatially varying environments (Henrich and
Boyd 1998). A number of ingenious hypotheses besides group selection have been proposed to
explain human cooperation in recent years (Hammerstein 2003), but we believe that the best
evidence supports a major role for cultural group selection (Richerson, Boyd, and Henrich
2003).
Why can’t selection on genes successfully favor innate changes that compensate for any
deviations from inclusive fitness optimizing? As Rappaport (1979: 100) puts it in the context of
cultural rules that prevent over-exploitation of the environment, “to drape nature in supernatural
Speed not Comfort Pg. 13
veils may be to provide her with some protection against human folly and extravagance.”
Combined with punishment of malefactors, culture encases individuals in a web of institutions
that make deviation difficult and dangerous. Innate human nature will have been bent by the late
Pleistocene by the impact of being selected to live on a tribal scale in a culturally group-selected
world. This is an example of culture playing a leading role in the process of gene-culture
coevolution.
Nevertheless, the gene-culture coevolutionary system makes the perfection of human
altruistic tendencies exceedingly difficult. The problem is that our genetic reproductive system
has no analog of the suppression of reproduction among workers. As Donald Campbell (1983)
perceptively noted, humans are characterized by reproductive competition between the
cooperators, quite unlike the social insects. Those who act entirely on behalf of the group are
likely to be counter-selected at the individual level. Selection on genes to increase our inclusive
fitness no doubt goes on side by side with cultural group selection. Conflicts between narrower
loyalties to self-interest and kin and larger loyalties to groups generate considerable psychic pain,
as if genetic and culture rules still struggle for mastery of our behavior (Campbell 1975;
Richerson and Boyd 1998; Richerson and Boyd 1999). This phenomenon, we suggest, accounts
for many of the moral conflicts that are endemic to human life.
An Immense Gap
As Darwin supposed, apes and other animals can do everything we do to some
approximation. Primatologists like Christophe Boesch (personal communication) and Frans de
Waal (2000) stress how similar chimpanzees are to humans. Social learning turns out to be quite
common in animals, yet not even the most sophisticated animal social learners seem to have a
system approaching the human level of complexity (Heyes and Galef 1996). Chimpanzees in the
wild seem to have a considerable amount cultural variation (Whiten et al. 1999). For example,
the chimpanzees in some populations use stones to crack nuts on a simple anvil. On the other
hand, when Andrew Whiten and Michael Tomasello compared the skills of human children and
adult, lab-reared chimpanzees on the same imitation tasks, they found that children as young as 3
years were more proficient imitators than the chimpanzees (Tomasello 1996; Whiten and
Custance 1996).
The long-term evolutionary consequences of the enlarged capacity of humans to imitate and
teach differentiate us very markedly from our ape ancestors and relatives. The critical feature is
that human imitation is accurate enough and fast enough that we can progressively improve
artifacts and social institutions to generate adaptations that rival the famous chestnuts of organic
evolution like the vertebrate eye (Boyd and Richerson 1996). The Inuit kayak, for example, is a
marvel of traditional engineering. Light, fast, and seaworthy, it was constructed from the very
limited inventory of raw materials available in the High Arctic using stone-age tools.
Chimpanzees, by contrast, use unmodified stones to crack nuts and twigs just stripped of their
leaves to fish for termites.
The story is much the same regarding social institutions. The kin-based social organization
of chimpanzees is not markedly more complex than that of many other social mammals. Primate
troops very often number about the same size as hunting and gathering bands, but no other
primate has permanent bonds of affiliation linking many troops into anything like a tribe. Robin
Dunbar (1993), noting that a good correlation exists in other primates between brain size and
group size, plotted humans on the regression line. The predicted group size of humans by this
Speed not Comfort Pg. 14
method is about 150. Joseph Birdsell’s (1953) well known estimate of 500 for the average size of
Australian tribes is considerably larger than this figure, especially given that the average person
would have live in a larger tribe than the average.
Human artifacts and institutions are not only sophisticated but highly variable and rapidly
evolving. By the end of the last Ice Age humans had spread all over the world, adapting to life
from the margins of the glaciers to the equator using mainly cultural means. Other apes, by
contrast, remain restricted to the tropical forest environments of our common ancestor.
The Social Instincts Primeval
Substantial advances in our understanding of human origins have been made since Victorian
times (Klein 1999). While the human lineage has been distinct from that of the other apes for
some five million years, the final modernization of humans occurred in the late Pleistocene.
Richard Klein believes that fully modern humans emerged in Africa rather suddenly about
70,000 years ago. McBrearty and Brooks (2000) argue that a sequence of gradual changes in
Africa, stretching back some 300,000 years, led gradually the level of technical and stylistic
sophistication characteristic of modern people. In any case, about 50,000 years ago modern
people spread out of Africa to the rest of the Old World, replacing more archaic humans like the
Neanderthals of Western Eurasia. Analysis of mitochondrial DNA from Neanderthals suggests a
rather deep split between these forms and modern humans, dating to about 600,000 years ago
(Rightmire 1997). The human genome has quite low genetic variability compared to that of
chimpanzees, and all modern humans seem to have shared a quite recent African ancestor
(Kaessmann and Paabo 2002; Rogers and Jorde 1995). One of the important genes involved in
language production probably originated in its modern form within the last 100,000 years (Enard
et al. 2002). Thus, the paleoanthropological and genetic data concur in suggesting that all
modern humans are very closely related.
Although the social instincts leave no direct fossil evidence, we can be fairly certain that our
common late African ancestors were quite modern in this regard. The best indirect evidence
comes from the sophistication of stone tools. The people who left Africa 50,000 years ago left
with a toolkit of modern sophistication. We know from an inadvertent natural experiment that
humans need to maintain a rather large social network to resist the loss of toolkit sophistication.
When the Bass Strait flooded with rising sea levels after the last glacial, it isolated about 4,000
Australians on Tasmania. Over the ensuing 10 millennia, their toolkit became gradually less
sophisticated until by the time of contact with Europeans they had the simplest toolkit ever
collected. According to the analysis of Joseph Henrich (submitted), most attempts to teach or
imitate the making of a complex artifact lead to slight imperfections. In a small group, these
imperfection will accumulate. In a larger group, the occasional gifted artisan will correct the
accumulated errors and have the effect of maintaining complex cultural adaptations against this
erosion. Humans have to maintain a surprisingly large cultural orbit, far larger than the tribe, to
maintain a complex toolkit. Modern humans have tribal alliances, trade networks, intermarriage,
and other means of connecting themselves culturally on a much larger scale than the tribal social
unit. Neanderthals had as large a brain as Moderns, but a much less sophisticated toolkit. Most
likely, their social instincts were rather less sophisticated than ours, but all of us late Pleistocene
African hunter-gatherers maintained quite complex toolkits wherever we spread, with the
exception of the unfortunately long-isolated Tasmanians.
Speed not Comfort Pg. 15
Moral Progress Via Sympathy
The last ten millennia, and especially the last five millennia, have witnessed dramatic moral
progress in the sense that humans have come to be able to cooperate in ever larger groups.
Archaeologists and historians have filled in many of the details of the evolution of civilized
moral communities since Darwin’s day. Even more than in the Victorian era, we have learned
from the horrors of the 20th Century to view the moral claims of the “civilized” societies with a
skeptical eye. While larger scale societies do not solve all old moral problems and often create
new ones, the provision of justice, defense, and social welfare services, however crude, solves
problems that tribes cannot. The scope of patriotism was enlarged from the tribe of a few
thousand to the scale of nations that today have as many as a billion inhabitants living in the
same moral community. Such societies can, for example, manage highly productive economies
with a much greater division of labor than is possible in simpler societies.
The cultural evolution of large-scale institutions was, we believe, the product of workarounds (Richerson and Boyd 2001, 1999). The tribal social instincts evolved to underpin only
relatively small social systems, but these resources are enough to provide real scope for the
evolution of moral progress. We shall concentrate on a specific work-around here for illustrative
purposes: the enlargement of the symbolic sphere. Tribal social systems, recall, tended to have a
common language, common rituals, common beliefs about the supernatural, common stylistic
artifacts, and the like. Those who differed in these regards belong to other tribes. Thus, our
innate psychology seems to be adapted to count those with whom we share such symbols as
those to whom sympathy is due.
As state-level systems welded formerly independent tribes into an integrated society, they
made lavish use of symbolic systems. Monumental architecture is one of the most common
markers of emerging state-level systems. The monuments served as an excuse to mobilize
masses of laborers in a common project and as the centerpiece of mass rituals afterwards. They
symbolized a common religion and usually a common political system. The symbolic unity of
the early state—as for many later empires—may often have been as much the unity of the elite as
the unity of society as a whole. Elites often have little sympathy for the lesser classes, and often
the sentiment is reciprocated. Complex societies always encapsulate tribal scale units that
maintain varying degrees of autonomy and resistance against the hegemony of elite institutions.
Nevertheless, common religion and common nation often count for a lot. The humble are more
or less reconciled to their lot, elites are more or less paternalistic, and society lurches along
despite having a far less than perfect moral system. Often, independent societies are knitted
together by international institutions of some real force. The ancient Greeks fought zealously to
maintain the independence of their poleis, but they had enough common institutions to
collectively resist a Persian invasion and later to follow Alexander on his conquests. The great
world religions likewise support institutions that incorporate people from diverse societies into a
related set of moral communities.
At the same time, symbolic systems evolve rather quickly and easily. New dialects grow
up on social fault lines (Labov 2001). Religious heresies are often a tool of the oppressed and are
never entirely suppressed, even by such institutions as the Catholic Inquisitions or modern secret
police. The recent rise of the current world’s many varieties of fundamentalism is a case in point
(Marty and Appleby 1991). Rodney Stark, the prominent iconoclastic sociologist of religion, has
mounted an impressive empirical defense of both the functionality and dysfunctionality of
Speed not Comfort Pg. 16
fundamentalist style religious communities (Stark 2003, 1997; Finke and Stark 1992; Stark and
Bainbridge 1996).
As Darwin understood, moral progress is never guaranteed. Why not? First, human
communities are still subject, as we have seen, to multi-level selection. Small-scale subcommunities are often very successful at socializing their offspring and just plain supporting
“natural” increase. Anabaptists are a good example. Thus, the evolution of smaller-scale social
units is always tending to undermine larger-scale ones. Second, humans appear have a strong
innate need to be part of a functional small-scale community. If the larger-scale community fails
to provide such attachments, smaller-scale organizations with narrower definitions of patriotism
will evolve to fill such needs. “Nation” and “tribe” are always in competition for our loyalties
(Garthwaite 1993). Sympathy tends to cause us to favor for more inclusive systems, but
patriotisms tend to demand a narrower calculus of friend and foe.
The great moral problem of our time is how to grow larger-scale loyalties to fit the fact
that the world is now so famously a global village, while at the same time creating tribal-scale
units that reassure us that we belong to a social system with a human face. The existence of
weapons of mass destruction and the need to manage important aspects of the environment as a
global commons threaten catastrophe if we fail in this project. Persuasive humanistic and other
universalistic perspectives in the spirit of Darwin are not far to seek (Coon 2000). The problem is
that only a relatively small elite is so persuaded. Even in the most enlightened European
countries, internationalism risks a nationalistic reaction. Stark and Bainbridge (1996) make the
case that secularly and religiously liberal communities in the West are marked by a barely latent
demand for tribal identities, manifest in relatively high rates of interest in cults in the most liberal
regions. If our work-around analysis is correct, a liberalism that does not make ample provision
for satisfying tribal-scale loyalties will fail. We have evolutionary debts to individual autonomy,
family, and tribe that must be paid. Utopian schemes fail by ignoring these debts and evil
empires flourish by exploiting them. The key is somehow a “federal” world system that
encourages small-scale loyalties under a system of legitimate rule of law that enforces mutual
tolerance of tribes and nations. On the positive side, tribes have brought families into such
systems and nations have effectively bound tribes together. Anthropologist Christopher Boehm
(1996) and sociologist Jonathan Turner (1995) note that both simple can complex societies have
potent collective decision-making systems to apply to large-scale, deliberate cultural change
(constitutional conventions are a good example). On the negative, universalists have clearly
understood the basic problem of bringing nations under an international rule of law since the
disaster of World War I, yet net progress continued to lag behind the growth of threats to the
global village for the entire 20th Century. The failure of the first reigning superpower since Great
Britain in the 19th Century so far to lead the establishment of a legitimate “New World Order” is
a troubling disgrace. Universalists have an epoch-making piece of difficult work cut out for
them—American universalists first among them.
The Parable of the Argentine Ant
We have presented a picture of human society as an evolutionary system that seems to have
defied an evolutionary law of gravity. W.D. Hamilton’s theory of inclusive fitness says, in effect,
that love, empathy, and altruism will be drastically undersupplied by evolutionary processes.
Natural selection must discount aid to others by the coefficient of genetic relatedness. This
vicious constraint on the potential for the evolution of morality exists despite the fact that in
principle altruism could be favored any time its fitness benefits exceed its costs. Given that the
Speed not Comfort Pg. 17
closest relationship most organisms have to one another is ½, and that only a handful of other
individuals typically have this level of relationship, a staggering number of altruistic deals in the
world go begging according to this theory. And so, mainly, it seems to be.
As with real gravity, Hamilton’s rule cannot be defied, only finessed. Flight is possible by
counteracting gravity with other principles of physics. So too with the evolution of moral
systems. A relative handful of species, such as ourselves and the social insects, have found
various means to make extraordinary altruism fly (Genet 1997). The highest flying case of social
evolution by some standards is a curious one, the Argentine ant (Holway, Suarez, and Case
1998). In its homeland, this species is an unremarkable species more or less obeying Hamilton’s
rule. Unrelated colonies fight ant wars in the familiar fashion. Argentine ants made their way,
hitch-hiking on human commerce, to California, the Mediterranean, and Australia. In each case,
the number of founding colonies was so small that genetic variation for colony-recognition odors
is minimal. Hence, even colonies that are completely unrelated cannot recognize one another as
distinct. Every Argentine ant is a perfect saint as far as other Argentine ants are concerned. The
dividend for such inadvertent sainthood is about a two-fold increase in colony productivity,
making Argentine ants the most successful ants in their adopted homelands. Our children have
grown up without ever seeing an ant war around our California homes. Argentine ants have
driven all other conspicuous species extinct in most urban habitats and are a major household
pest.
Humans are not unlike Argentine ants. We are not so perfectly cooperative as they, but our
genius at technology and social organization more than make up for our fractiousness. If God
made us, perhaps he has reason to regret it! The explosive growth of our population and our
technology has created dire threats to ourselves and the rest of the planet; we are a pest that
threatens to put every other in the dark.
The Argentine ants will presumably gradually evolve colony-recognition odors and vanish
into the background. No known mechanism can prolong their extraordinary defiance of
Hamilton’s rule or extend it beyond their own species. Humans are a different story. In the last
ten millennia we have stumbled and staggered forward on our uncertain adventure of moral
progress. We routinely, if unpredictably, unreliably, and sometimes foolishly, love dogs, cats,
foreign friends, “man” as a whole, gods and nature. Moral progress is merely a matter of
repeating the same tricks that we have use in the past to overcome slavery and similar evils.
Universalists—Buddha, Christ, Confucius, Jefferson, Darwin and so many others—light the
way. In an age of weapons of mass destruction, global climate change, and the mass extinction of
other species, our collective minds should be well concentrated on the problem. Modern
evolution tells a coherent scientific story that takes us back to the origins of the universe. Until
the evolution of human sympathy and our species’ unique potential to extend sympathy without
limits by means of political and ethical action, nothing like our moral communities existed on the
face of the earth. We are privileged to participate in the world’s first true adventure. Awesome
dangers lie on our path. We have not and will not escape all of them. But we are not helpless
pawns in the evolutionary game as every species before us has been. Individual by individual,
tribe by tribe, nation by nation we have the prospect of passing, by the exercise of a steadfast
commitment to sympathy, to a better future by our on efforts. Mother Nature willing!
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